A Friend in Deed
by Swordchucks
Summary: A oneshot Harry/Fleur fic. Starts mid GoF and runs pretty quickly through the end of OotP.


AN: I was feeling sick last night and saw Ecstatic Immolation (my old Harry/Fleur) fic panned somewhere, which got me to thinking about what it would take for me to write a Harry/Fleur fic that didn't rely on a cliché. So, I spent about three hours on this and… well, here it goes. This is pretty much a oneshot, but if it inspires someone to do more with it… feel free.

oOoOoOoOo

**A Friend in Deed**

Oneshot

oOoOoOoOo

The chill of the Black Lake no longer touched Harry as he pushed himself deeper and deeper. He'd dealt with a few Grindylows and was becoming more confident about the task in general as he sank. That was until he almost had a heart attack as Moaning Myrtle drifted past.

"You're getting close now," she said, somehow clearly audible under the water. "They're only just a bit that way. Too bad about the French girl, though," she noted, waving in a direction.

Harry tried to get out a question, but it only came out as more bubbles. Myrtle seemed to get the meaning, though, and grinned. "Oh, her? The Grindylows have her back over there," she said with another giggle. "I wonder if she or her sister will haunt the lake after they die?"

The humor of the dead wasn't something that Harry understood and he didn't really think he wanted to understand it. However, now he had to face a moment of decision… go back for Fleur or push ahead and hope he could save both her sister and his hostage from whatever challenges were ahead. A split second passed and his mind was made up. He kicked off to rescue a certain French witch. This tournament was about unity, after all.

oOoOoOoOo

Harry was more than a little surprised as a delicate but surprisingly strong hand pulled him into a broom cupboard. "Who-" he began, but a glimpse of white-blond hair answered his question before he'd asked it. "What do you want, Ms. Delacour?"

"Mr. Potter," she began and took a deep breath as though preparing herself for something unpleasant. Harry found the motion more than a little attractive. She continued in her thick French accent, though he could follow it fairly easily by watching her body language. "I wish to apologize for things I have said and to acknowledge the life debt that I now owe you."

"Life-debt? What are you talking about, Fleur? Professor Dumbledore said that none of us were ever in real danger. You would have been fished out of the lake, and your sister, too, if I hadn't rescued you."

"Mr. Potter… Harry… did you think that my life was in danger at the time?" she asked and he nodded. "Did you somehow instigate the danger I was in or have any reason to suspect that someone allied with you set it up? Were your intentions pure?" she continued and he shook his head and nodded to each question, respectively. "I believed that I was in mortal peril, as you did. The is sufficient for me to owe you a life-debt under the old ways. That someone else might have saved me is irrelevant."

Harry blinked. He opened his mouth. He closed his mouth. He changed topics. "What is a life-debt, exactly?"

"When one saves the life of another, they owe that person a debt. It is not a magical contract, but the old customs say it must be followed. Many believe that not following the customs will lead to a man being rendered sterile or a woman struck barren. Others say it will lead to bad luck for the rest of the offender's life. There is also a social stigma that goes along with it."

"But what is it, exactly?" Harry asked, just knowing that he wasn't going to like having it hanging over him. Dumbledore had said Pettigrew owed him one, but if it was just a social thing… well, it didn't sound like it would matter much.

"You can request one thing from me. Any one thing," she said and something about her… pulsed. A soft inner glow seemed to light up in her and she grew just a little more beautiful. A pleasant fuzziness filled his mind and Harry felt mildly detached. Realizing that it felt oddly like a very weak Imperius curse, he gave it a slight mental 'shove' and the feeling vanished as quickly as it came.

"Nice trick, Fleur, but Professor Moody showed us the Imperius curse last term. If I can throw that off… well, whatever you're doing doesn't compare."

The glow vanished and Fleur stared at Harry, wide eyed. "You can push it off? Just like that?"

"It wasn't that strong… what was that, anyway? What were you trying to make me do?" he asked, his hand on his wand hilt in his pocket and ready to draw it at any moment. Until she made a move, though, he would leave it where it was.

"I had thought… it was a gift of the Veela. I wanted to make you ask for something… physical and immediate. I do not want to have this debt hanging on me, and I… I don't want you to ask me for something too hard to give."

Harry's brow knit at the idea. Suddenly, he had some inspiration. "Alright, I've got what I want from you. You don't have to go out of your way to do it or anything, but I want you to be friendly with me for the rest of the term. No more looking down your nose at me, but you don't have to come seek me out, either." He threw it out to get the stupid debt off both of their heads. He didn't ask for something that would be much of a boon since he didn't really think she owed him anything.

Fleur was taken aback. "You have one boon… anything… from me and you want something so… small? Are… Oh, I am sorry. I did not realize that you were, how do you say, playing for the other team."

"Playing for-What?!? No, I'm not-I mean, I'm-I like girls. I like them, but I don't want to, you know, make a girl do something just because of some silly custom." Whether it was his sputtering or his red face, he didn't know, but Fleur started laughing.

His anger started to rise, but went just as quickly when she took him in a hug. "You are different from other boys, Harry Potter. Different in a good way." The fact that she left him blushing quite hard seemed to bring back her good mood and she continued her gentle, playful teasing for a bit. Harry was only ten minutes late to Potions and blushing like mad, but the detention had almost been worth seeing a side of Fleur he didn't know she possessed.

oOoOoOoOo

"Why am I here again?" he asked, adjusting his fencing helmet to face directly forward after it had been knocked askew by Fleur's epee.

"Because you are my friend and I will not have you getting killed in this tournament. The teachers are forbidden from helping us, but that does not mean we cannot help each other," she said, assuming a ready stance again.

He sighed heavily and blinked away the sweat as he raised his epee into a similar position and lunged at her for his fifth unsuccessful attempt in just as many minutes.

oOoOoOoOo

Voldemort was back. Cedric had nearly been killed in the process, too, but Harry's quick reflexes had barely managed to push him aside. He'd been knocked unconscious as his head hit a tombstone and Wormtail, the constant screwup, had taken him for dead. There had been a ritual, a desperate duel, and finally an escape.

Cedric hadn't seen much of anything before he was knocked unconscious and so couldn't back up Harry's story, leaving it to be downplayed and denied by the Ministry. To make matters even worse, he was now being forced back to the Dursleys', a place he sincerely did not wish to be. He fingered the small medallion on the leather cord that Fleur had given him. He was almost immune to her teasing, but when she'd dropped the cord over his head and given him a more-than-friendly kiss before she left, in the middle of breakfast in the Great Hall, he'd turned beet red.

The note she'd pressed into his pocket explained that it was a portkey to her family's estate in the south of France and that he had a standing invitation. He rolled his eyes when he saw that the password had been set to 'amour'. His French was halting, but he certainly knew that one. He and Fleur weren't dating, as much as Ron refused to believe that, but they did have an odd sort of friendship going that he valued almost as much as he valued his friendship with Hermione. The two relationships were nothing alike, but he enjoyed them both. The girls got along fairly well, which was an added bonus.

Sometime between the second and third tasks, he'd kind of forgotten that Cho even existed.

oOoOoOoOo

The numbing cold of the Dementors forced him to his knees. He scrambled for his wand and finally got his hand on it in time to save his cousin with a very large, very flashy Patronus. Twenty minutes later saw an expulsion notice winging through his Aunt's window. He took one look at the notice, spit on it and growled out. "Bugger this. Let Voldemort have the lot of them. Amour."

Several dizzying moments later, he was standing in a moderately sized room with two doors. He shrugged and took a step forward only to push into something invisible. It wasn't a sudden impact, but a fuzzy sort of resistance that grew as he moved forward. In a lot of ways it was like walking into a huge invisible sponge.

He tried a different direction and found that the sponge barrier thing went all around a large circle drawn on the floor. He tried a few things, but it wouldn't budge. He was on the verge of sitting down to wait when the door opened and the stunningly beautiful woman that Harry recognized as Fleur's mother stepped into the room. Her name was Amarante Delacour, but Fleur insisted that she'd make him call her Ami.

"Oh, Harry Potter. Fleur told me that you might visit!" she said, waving her wand in his general direction. There was a brief tingling sensation and he found the sponge gone. "I just had to tune you into the wards. As we are not quite human, we are an easy target for… never mind that. Come, come. What are you doing here so late at night? You look pale, have you been eating?"

Harry chuckled lightly, but allowed himself to be gently guided into another room appointed with comfortable chairs and a large fireplace. "I had a run-in with some Dementors. I defended myself, but I'm afraid I've been expelled from Hogwarts," he said, his voice completely free of emotion. A detached part of his brain realized that he was in shock, but there wasn't much else for it.

The cocoa she provided him with helped a lot, as did Fleur's hug when she came to investigate the commotion and found her friend from Hogwarts sitting on her couch. She pulled the story out of him and Ami wisely decided to vacate the area while her daughter worked herself into a furor at the story of his treatment.

Fleur stood up, wand in hand and marched toward the fireplace, no doubt to use the Floo. She had the canister in hand before she felt Harry's hand on her shoulder, stopping her. "Thank you. You don't have to do anything… just the fact that you're willing to stand up for me is… it's more than I've ever had and it's more than I deserve."

She turned to him, then, and took him in her arms. It didn't take long for Harry to cry into her shoulder. In between sobbing fits, he told Fleur the story of his life. All of those little bits and pieces he'd never told anyone or that no one had ever done anything about. They stayed up long into the night, eventually falling asleep on the plush rug in front of the couch, Fleur sitting up with Harry's head resting in her lap.

oOoOoOoOo

Things were… weird between Harry and Fleur. They'd never been weird before. Harry didn't know what to make of it, but knew that it wasn't something he could put into words, much less confront. He had spent two weeks living with the Delacours and hiding from the English who might wish to snap his wand. They were able to get the Daily Prophet by noon of the day it was issued, and he'd seen in print that he was wanted for violating the Secrecy Statutes and had been officially expelled from Hogwarts.

Fortunately for him, the French and English didn't always see eye to eye and his discreet request for asylum had been approved. The fact that news of it hadn't leaked out was a testament to the respect that the late Jules Delacour, Fleur's father, had earned during the first war with Voldemort and the tumult afterwards. The man had died while valiantly defending the French equivalent of Diagon Alley during the rise of one of the European Dark Lords who had sought to expand into France in the wake of Voldemort's reign of terror. If he hadn't died in that battle, the conventional wisdom is that he would have been elected Minister before he turned fifty.

Safe from prosecution, at least, Harry was still faced with the challenge of education. Fleur taught him as best she could, but he was a fast learner and was almost her match magically before the end of the Tournament. Learning more meant a school of some sort, or tutors. As he didn't have the funding for tutors, he was left with no choice but to have Fleur make a few more discreet inquiries on his behalf with Madame Maxime. The half-giant readily swore herself to secrecy and promised him a place at Beauxbatons in the fall.

Ami did her best to fill his free time, of which he had plenty, with some of the things she'd learned about magic and the world. He found that the topic of wizarding customs was both fascinating and frustrating, though the frustration was mostly directed at the fact that no one had shown an interest in teaching him those things sooner. There were any number of social pitfalls that he could have fallen into during his time at Hogwarts that could have led to a betrothal, blood feud, or worse.

The rest of his time, he spent with Fleur. They dueled, played, flirted, and generally acted like children for as long as they pleased. Fleur had a job offer with Gringotts that started around the same time as school, making this her last real summer of freedom, and she seemed intent on enjoying it.

Of course, school did eventually start up and Harry attended under several layers of glamour. That lasted for about a week before his Professors judged him too advanced to be taking part in the normal classes and instead offered him a more independent education path. As he wasn't part of the regular classes, he would meet with one of the five Professors assigned to teach him Charms, Transfiguration, Defense, Potions, and Herbology. History of Magic and Astronomy were both more suited to truly independent study and he only met with a professor for each of those classes twice a month.

Since he wasn't taking classes with the other students, he was able to test for and receive a limited Apparition license that allowed him to Apparate alone to and from school and to a small number of other destinations. Sometime during the first few weeks of the term, he found himself sharing a small apartment in Paris with Fleur, who had wanted to get out of her mother's house and naturally had pulled Harry along with her.

The two settled into another odd relationship, somewhere between that of roommates and an old married couple. Harry did the cooking and much of the cleaning while Fleur did the laundry (she claimed it was to keep her underwear safe from his 'dirty teenage hornomes') and a few other tasks.

In a lot of ways, they were living in a fantasy world. Harry was desperately trying to ignore the mounting news coming out of Britain about the tightening grip of the Ministry, and Fleur was trying to pretend that Harry wouldn't go back to that 'horrible country' that had treated him so badly.

Both knew it could not last.

oOoOoOoOo

Voldemort had shown himself. Harry stared at the paper in front of him with wide eyes. Apparently, Voldemort had led an assault on the Department of Mysteries to claim a Prophecy. He'd almost escaped with it when Dumbledore showed up and the two fought. During the scuffle, the Prophecy had been triggered and all present, including Minister Fudge, had heard the full text.

"Dammit," Harry muttered to himself as he read the text printed in the Daily Prophet for all to see. Right below it, headlines announced "Minister Grants Potter Pardon" and "Will Harry Potter Save Us?".

Fleur took the paper from his unresisting fingers and scanned the articles, too. "Harry…" she said softly, her voice barely more than a whisper. "When do you leave?"

"I'm not going," he said flatly.

"You are… I know you… I know you too well to believe that you won't go back." Her face was hidden behind the paper, and Harry couldn't tell from her voice how she felt about this new revelation.

"Come with me," he said, changing directions as he silently admitted that she was probably right about him going back.

"Harry… I can't. I have a job here, and my mother is here, as well."

"You can. Come with me," he said as he pushed the paper down to reveal her tear soaked face. "Marry me."

"Marry you?" she gasped out, her eyes going wide in an instant. "You can't be serious!"

"I'm not Sirius, that's my godfather. I am dead serious, though. Marry me. Come back to England with me."

"Marry you, though… we have not so much as kissed, but you want me to marry you?"

Harry moved quickly, plucking the paper fully from her hands and sliding his arm around her. He pressed his lips to hers and willed her to feel the deep affection for her that he'd nursed for so long that it had sprouted into a towering inferno of passion. He'd kept it all bottled up inside of him, prolonging the dreamlike life they'd had together in France. He'd been afraid to say anything, though he suspected she felt something similar for him. If he'd spoken and been wrong, she wouldn't have been the same with him, something he wanted to avoid at all costs.

Now, he'd said what he had been afraid to even think. He was going back to England and if he didn't make her understand his feelings and she didn't return him, he'd have lost her.

A second later, she returned the kiss with an equal amount of passion. When they finally broke apart, she breathed out heavily and managed to speak. "I will marry you, Harry James Potter."

Somehow, Harry had a feeling that no matter what happened in England, things would be okay. He had the love of the most beautiful woman he'd ever met, both inside and out, and life simply didn't get any better than that.


End file.
